New Love for Women of Age

Totally Married Milly is beautiful, smart, funny, energetic and disgustingly youthful. She has a husband who loves her, and she loves him, too. But she is plagued by a bad case of Don’t Want to Grow Old.

She’s several years younger than me, and when she complains as if she’s the oldest person on Earth at 37, I want to shake her by the shoulders--the way someone would shake me if there were actually anyone older than me.

Totally Married Milly is dealing with her fear of aging in a manner commonly associated with the male midlife crisis. The experts tell us that the midlife crisis doesn’t exist--until the experts start going bald.

Milly’s coping style is flirting. On the job, at the store, in the health club. She says she has no intention of having an affair. “I just keep thinking that if anything happened between Ricky and me, no one would ever love me again.”

So I thought about Totally Married Milly when I was out at lunch with two divorced friends. One left her husband; the other got left. They are both beautiful, smart, funny and energetic. Although divorce was very painful, they now seem to be enjoying dating. Maybe Totally Married Milly thinks no one will love her again, but it didn’t take these women long to find interested men. They may not represent a scientific sample, but they were giggling like teen-agers.

Ophelia, who divorced her husband a year ago, has since been through a younger man, a traveling salesman and a lover who was planning their life together on the first date.

Desiree, who is over 50, talked about what she found most difficult about dating again. “When I was dating in 1957, you didn’t have to ask about AIDS. Now it seems we have to ask about it on the first date. But how do you do that?”

Ophelia replied, “You just say, ‘We should use condoms, right?’ Sometimes they’ll tell you then that they’ve been tested and are HIV negative.”

“Yeah,” said Desiree, “but can you trust them?”

“You have to,” said Ophelia.

I said that it was really no different from asking about birth control when we were younger.

Ophelia, the trusting one, said, “Right. That’s how I ended up having to get married at 17.”

We talked about what kinds of things they’ve done on dates. After 40, dating turns out to be a lot more varied than teen-age dating. As I recall, you were lucky then if you made it to a movie or pizza. The usual outing was to the Chevy. If he was a sport, he left the heater on.

Ophelia and Desiree have been hiking and skiing and even out of the country on dates. They’ve been to lectures and health clubs and political fund-raisers. But the common thread didn’t emerge until I asked what they were doing this weekend.

“Well, Dan asked me to go with him to pick up his new Acura Legend,” Desiree said.

“That’s incredible!” Ophelia chimed in. “I went with Miles to get his Legend last week.”

“You want to hear something even stranger?” Desiree asked. “You’re the fourth divorced woman who’s told me that.”

So, my advice to Totally Married Milly is this: Be good to your husband and stop flirting. If you must have a backup guy, you can always find one with his nose pressed against the Acura dealership.

Acura Legend: the official car of the male midlife crisis.

I asked my husband (who will be chained to that Toyota for the rest of his life) what he thought of the Acura phenomenon.

“Oh, it’s just for the pickup line,” he said.

“What pickup line?” I asked, wondering how he knew so much about pickup lines.

He said it was just a convenient party line. You go up to a woman at a party and say, “Can I tell you about my Legend?”

I guess a Prizm just wouldn’t work.